Un’offerta speciale, 1963

A canvas depicting the solar system is mounted on a stretcher that is just slightly larger; moreover, the adhesives on the verso make the canvas protrude slightly from the stretcher. The Sun painted by the artist with the colour orange, in a central position, stands out against the blue background, while the other planets, isolated in negative, reveal the unprimed canvas. On the back, a colour reproduction of a woman's face is accompanied by the words on which the title of the work is based.
Un’offerta speciale is part of a group of works (from GPO-0028 to GPO-0049) whose common denominator is the presence of an intervention on both the recto and the verso of the painting. Surfaces of various types take turns appearing on the recto (painted paper, graph paper, photographic reproductions, shaped wooden panels), while on the verso (hidden from view) we find the details of images and printed words taken from magazines or from books. The title, when specified, refers to a textual element present on the verso. The artist explains that: “Just as on the surface various elements alternate among themselves, but always remain ‘blind’, in the sense that they tend not to supply an image, but are there for their own sake, occupying that given space, so the title itself is absolutely autonomous with respect to the surface [...], constituted by a fragment of words and, at times, images, following the signature and the date, on a white paper square on the back of the picture” (1972).1
The celestial iconography, appearing for the first time in Paolini's work, will become a recurring motif from the 1980s onwards (cf. GPO-0464, GPO-0567).
The same subject was reproduced, with slight variations, in the work made in the same year titled Old fashioned (GPO-0045).

1 G. Paolini in G. Celant, Giulio Paolini (New York: Sonnabend Press, 1972), p. 34 (revised translation, republished in Giulio Paolini 1960-1972, edited by G. Celant [Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2003], p. 122), reprint (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2019), p. 34. Cf. also the artist's remarks in C. Lonzi, Autoritratto (Bari: De Donato Editore, 1969), p. 367, reprint (Milan: Et al./Edizioni, 2010), p. 280, English edition (Brussels-London: Divided Publishing, 2021), p. 320.